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iFixit Answers Is Live!

After a solid month of testing, tons of feedback, hundreds of little tweaks (and a few big ones), we’re making iFixit Answers public! Everyone in the beta has gotten a tremendous amount of help with problems on a wide variety of hardware. Now it’s your turn! Go ask a question.

At the moment I’m writing this, people have asked 255 questions yielding 811 answers. Out of all of those questions, just 5 haven’t gotten answers yet. (I don’t expect them to stay unanswered very long.)

Wow, this is useful!

Here are three of the most popular questions from the beta:

How dangerous is working on a CRT?

The answers to this contain lots of interesting information about the thousands of volts that CRTs build up and the tools that technicians have to use to work with them.

Where can I find a star point screwdriver?

Apple’s latest MacBooks have a screw that looks different than we’re used to. It turns out that it’s actually a new kind of security bit, a ‘Torx Plus 6’ with five points instead of the standard six. Fortunately, a 1.5mm flat head screwdriver works just fine to remove it!

What does my Wii’s blinking light mean?

It turns out this person was worried for no reason! The blinking light on a Wii (rather unintuitively) means that there is a new message waiting on the Wii message board.

Nintendo Wii repair from iFixit Answers

First user to hit 1k reputation!

Our first user hit 1,000 rep, and several others are well on their way.

Spreading the Christmas joy

I thought it would be fun to have a little drawing to celebrate the Answers launch. So we’re going to give away some hardware. What are the goodies?

I have the Zune HD from our teardown (no, we don’t destroy things when we take them apart) and one of those fancy new Wacom Bamboo Touch tablets. They’re both awesome devices. I know, because I’ve personally been testing them out to make sure they worked! (Yes, I love my job.)

We’re going to randomly select two winners from people who have at least 100 reputation on December 24th. What’s your rep? Start helping people with their problems!